LANG A338F

SEMANTICS
Lecture 2
Introduction:
The notion of meaning

10 September 2024

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 Disclaimer
This course is about semantics, but here we do
not use the word “semantics” like below:

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 Content Covered

1. What is semantics?
2. Why semantics?
3. An overview of the topics
4. How to make the most out of this course

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 Outline of this lecture
The notion of meaning
1. The importance of meaning
2. The meanings of meaning
3. Sense and reference
4. Types of meaning in language

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 1. The importance of meaning
• Language is now commonly seen as a meaning system (Michael
Halliday). Such is the importance of meaning in language that the
American linguist Roman Jakobson says: Language without
meaning is meaningless.

• Naturally, the main function of language is to mean (i.e. to

construct and convey meaning).

• We use language, for example, to:

- explain things to people
- tell people things they need to know
- tell stories
- mislead people, etc. 5
 1. The importance of meaning
• In each case, we are conveying a message or conveying meaning,
and we expect our interlocutors to be able to interpret the
message in the way in which we intended that they would.

• Clearly, language is all about meaning , and meaning is central to

what we do when we use language, because “[t]o communicate
linguistically is to convey meaning” (Elbourne, 2011, p.viii). That
is why when we do not understand what someone has said to us,
we characteristically say either:

What does it mean?

OR: What do you mean?
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 1. The importance of meaning
• Not surprisingly, the word “meaning” or “mean” has been
explicitly referenced in the titles of a large number of published
monographs, such as:
- The Meaning of Meaning (C. K. Ogden & I.A. Richards, 1923)
- Learning how to Mean (M. Halliday, 1975)
- Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning: Selected Papers of Ruqaiya
Hasan (edited by David Butt, et al., 1996)
- What is meaning? Fundamentals of Formal Semantics (Paul H.
Portner, 2005)
- Meaning in English: An Introduction to English (Lesley Jeffries,
1998)
- The Meaning of Everything. The Story of the Oxford English
Dictionary (Simon Winchester, 2003/2008) 7
 2. The meanings of meaning
• Given the prime importance of meaning in language,
one must ask: what is meaning?
• Like time, life and other fundamental concepts of our
existence, the concept of meaning itself is difficult to
define, and it is no exaggeration to say that in modern
linguistics, no widely agreed theory of meaning has
been formulated. (Yallop, 2007)
• Nevertheless, it is easier to make statements about
meaning in language than to describe the character of
the phenomenon that we call meaning.

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 2. The meanings of meaning
• Hence, various approaches towards the character of meaning
have been taken, which can perhaps be subsumed under the
following three headings:
• meaning as a psychological phenomenon, i.e. the ideas or
concepts speakers associate with a particular linguistic form; and
• meaning as a purely linguistic phenomenon, a property of the
linguistic sign, which is said to be determined on the basis of the
place of a sign in a language and its relationship to other signs;
• meaning as a phenomenon of use, i.e. a property that can be
determined on the basis of how a word form is actually used by
the speakers of a speech community. (Herbst, 2010)

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 2. The meanings of meaning
• To linguists, meaning can be defined as:

- “what a language expresses about the world we live in or any

possible or imaginary world” (Richards, & Schmidt, 2010, p.355); or

- “the characteristic of a linguistic form which allows it to be used

to pick out some aspect of the non-linguistic world” (Trask, &
Stockwell, 2007, p.165)

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 2. The meanings of meaning

• Linguists are chiefly interested in the way some

meanings relate to other meanings, that is, the
system of meanings, rather than the meanings of
individual items.
• Semantics is thus concerned with meaning as a
product of the linguistic system (i.e.
decontextualised meaning)

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 3. Sense and reference
• Two terms that are traditionally used for
talking about meaning are “sense” and
“reference”.
• They are two key related terms in semantics which
derive from Saussure’ s concept of the linguistic
sign.
• This means that every linguistic object (i.e. word) has
two elements: a sound image (signifier), and a sense or
meaning (thing signified).
• For example, the English word tree has a sound image
(/tri:/) and a meaning (‘treeness’). The two together
make up a single linguistic sign in English. 12
 3. Sense and reference
• Yet, the sound-meaning relationship is a conventional,
and not a natural, one. In other words, there is no
reason why any particular sound should be associated
with any particular meaning, and the pairing is an
arbitrary one.
• As for the objects themselves which we use the sign to
refer to, Saussure calls these referents.
• So words have two kinds of semantic meaning:
1. they signify one or more senses, that is, they
have signification. [intralinguistic]
2. they refer to things or activities in the outside world,
so they have reference. [extralinguistic]
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 3. Sense and reference

Diagram for the linguistic sign for ‘tree’ 14

 3. Sense and reference
• Sense
The “sense” of a word basically means the “meaning” of a word

• Reference
the relationship between a linguistic expression and something
which it picks out in the real or conceptual world

• Referent
the specific entity which the linguistic expression is about in a
particular context

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 3. Sense and reference
• Thus “reference” and “signification” are two semantic
relationships/dimensions which apply generally to items
in our mental lexicon.
• Yet the relationship between sense and reference is
often not a straightforward affair. This is due to at least
the following factors:
- polysemy
- same reference, different senses
- same sense, different references
- sense without reference

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 3. Sense and reference
Polysemy
• Consider the word, for example, ‘bond’, which has more
than one sense.
1/ MONEY. In a monetary sense, bond refers to an official
paper given by the government or a company to show
that you have lent them money that they will pay back to
you at an interest rate that does not change.
2/ RELATIONSHIP. In a relationship sense, bond refers to the
way in which two or more people are joined together.
3/ LAW. In a legal sense, bond refers to the written
agreement to do something.
• The word ‘bond’ has 3 senses in English, and there are
often semantic relationships among the different senses
of a word. 17
 3. Sense and reference

• E.g. I bought some bonds yesterday.

(Here, we make use of the monetary sense of bond, and
we pick up a real object in the world. In other words, we
are using language to pick up something in the real
world.)

• Reference depends on sense. You need to understand

the different senses of a word so that you can pick up the
right thing in the real world.
(i.e., you need to know the senses of a word so that you
know which entity/concept that I refer to in the real
world)
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 3. Sense and reference
Same reference, different senses
Consider:
1. Mary is an HKMU student.
2. The girl sitting next to me is an HKMU student.
Although the two expressions might be used to refer
to the same individual in the real world, they do not
have the same sense. Mary is simply the name of a
person, while the girl sitting next to me is a
description of a person using words in English. You
will need to understand the meanings of individual
words in order to understand the meaning of this
expression. 19
 3. Sense and reference

Same sense, different references

Can you pass me the cup so that I can give you some
coffee?

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 3. Sense and reference
Sense without reference
• What is the reference of:
Snow White? Batman? Unicorn?

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 3. Sense and reference
• If you are still a little confused about the terms
“sense”, “reference” and “referent”, here is another
example to help you.
Example
• What is the sense of romance?
– in love with another person
– a feeling of being good/happy
• What is the reference of romance?
– A situation exemplifying romance with lip action.
E.g. a kiss
• What is the referent of romance?
– A specific romantic action in a speech context. E.g.
a goodbye kiss at the train station. 22
 4. Types of meaning
• As noted earlier, there is yet no widely agreed theory of
meaning (Yallop, 2007). Still, in the study of meaning in
language, linguists distinguish between different types
of meaning. In perhaps the best-known book ever
written on semantics: The Meaning of Meaning (1923),
C. K. Ogden and I.A. Richards list as many as twenty-two
definitions of the word “meaning” such as:
- an intrinsic property
- the other words annexed to a word in the dictionary
- the connotation of a word
- the place of anything in a system
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 4. Types of meaning
In his book Semantics, Leech (1980) lists seven types of meaning:
Type
1. Conceptual meaning (sense) logical, cognitive, or denotative content

Associative meaning (sense)

2. Connotative meaning What is communicated by virtue of what language refers to

3. Social meaning What is communicated of the social circumstances of

language use.

4. Affective meaning What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the

speaker/writer.

5. Reflected meaning What is communicated through association with another

sense of the same expression

6. Collocative meaning What is communicated through association with words

which tend to occur in the environment of another word.

7. Thematic meaning What is communicated by the way in which the message24is

organized in terms of order and emphasis.
 4. Types of meaning
• Though Leech’s classification is rather comprehensive, it
does not seem to have received as much attention as it
deserves.
• In semantics today, we normally talk about these types
of meaning:
- word meaning
- sentence meaning
- denotative meaning
- connotative meaning
- figurative meaning
- evaluative meaning 25
 4. Types of meaning
Word meaning – the domain of lexical semantics – is
the meaning of a word. Much can be said about word
meaning. Particularly important is the following widely
acknowledged fact:
• The meaning of words ultimately depends on how
they are combined into phrases, and on how they are
used in social situations. (Michael Stubbs, 2001)

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 4. Types of meaning
• Sentence meaning – the domain of sentence semantics – is the
literal, compositional meaning as built up from the meanings of
the individual words.
• Sentence meaning is different from utterance meaning, which is
the domain of pragmatics concerned with the meaning which the
words have in the particular context in which they occur. Here is
an example:
[Seeing that Peter has put on a pair of socks of different colours]
Jane: Oh! You are a very creative person!
Peter: I was in a hurry this morning so …
• The distinction between sentence meaning and utterance
meaning is linked to the difference between semantics and
pragmatics. (De) contextualized meaning
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 4. Types of meaning
• Denotative meaning (denotation, literal meaning) is the
referential meaning of a word or expression.

• Connotative meaning (connotation, non-literal

meaning) is the evocative or affective meaning
associated with a word or expression. Two words or
expressions may have the same denotative meaning
but different connotations,
e.g. politicians and statesmen.

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 4. Types of meaning
Denotation and connotation
• Denotation
– the relationship between the linguistic unit and the whole class
of real objects
– the denotation of night = any time in the period of time from
sunset to the following sunrise
• Connotation
– some qualities/ideas that a particular word makes you think of
– it is subjective (i.e. depends on individual) and it has an emotive
component
– the connotation of night = scary? lonely? romantic?
(what is in your mind subjectively)
• While denotation is a static concept, connotation is a more dynamic
concept.
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 4. Types of meaning
Literal and non-literal meaning
• The literal meaning of a word or expression is its
basic or original meaning. The non-literal meaning of
a word or expression is its extended meaning.
• One might speak literally or non-literally to refer to
the same situation. Imagine you didn’t have lunch
today and you might say, literally:
1. I’m hungry.
Or, non-literally (with increasing exaggeration):
2. I’m starving.
3. I could eat a horse.
4. My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.
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 4. Types of meaning

Literal and non-literal meaning

• Non-literal meaning is very broad in scope and may have
to do with figurative or metaphorical meaning.
• We often use language non-literally through metaphor.
• We use metaphor to describe something more abstract
in terms of something more concrete.
• For instance, we can use money (more concrete) to
understand time (more abstract); or use war (more
concrete) to understand argument (more abstract).
– The ‘Time is money’ metaphor
– The ‘Argument is war’ metaphor
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 4. Types of meaning
Literal and non-literal meaning
• The ‘Time is money’ metaphor:
You’re wasting my time.
Can I borrow some time from you?
How do you spend your time these days?
I’ve invested a lot of time in her.
• The ‘Argument is war’ metaphor:
Your claims are indefensible.
He shot down all of my arguments.
He attacked the weak points of my argument.
He demolished (= completely destroyed) my argument. 32
 4. Types of meaning
Literal and non-literal meaning
• Sometimes, it is difficult to draw a firm line between
literal and non-literal uses of language.
• For instance, many people would not consider how do
you spend your time these days? as non-literal. If this use
of spend is non-literal, then, it is really difficult to find
uses of language which are literal! When a metaphorical
use of a word is frequent, the use would become part of
the normal literal language.

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 Concluding remarks
• In this lecture, we have looked at the notion of meaning,
especially its importance, its definition, the linguistic sign and
types of meaning. Although scholars have not offered a widely
agreed theory of meaning, they have offered a great deal of
insights into it. In the coming weeks, we will deal with
meaning under different lecture topics.

• To end this lecture, we should perhaps remember the

following:

“Semantics is the complex interplay of morphology, lexis, and

syntax. Complex though it is, however, it does not account for
all aspects of meaning.”
(Widdowson, 1996, p.61)

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 References
• Bauer, L. (2012). Beginning linguistics. Basingstoke,
Hampshire: PalgraveMacMillan.
• Elbourne, P. Meaning: A slim guide to semantics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
• Leech, G. (1981). Semantics: The study of meaning.
London: Penguin Books.
• Widdowson, H. (1996). Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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 Next lecture

• Analyzing meaning: some methods

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